Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday October 25, 2011 @11:54AM
from the because-clouds-do-not-have-hormones dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "A few months ago I was sent a really weird video showing a cloud snapping around suddenly, far faster than wind could explain. I asked a meteorologist about it, who told me it was due to ice crystals re-aligning when the cloud's electric field discharged. It's pretty amazing to watch, and a great example of how many cool things happen right in front of us that we never notice."

There are new discoveries everyday. The day will come when we can cross stellar distances as easy as we now cross an ocean, Of that I have no doubt. Maybe not in my lifetime or my children's or even great grand children. But someday it will happen. How do I know this? All you have to do is look from where we have come. Each society in history has thought they knew all there is to know about the universe. We are not different I laugh in the face of any one who is pompous and arrogant enough to say It is impo

Religious? There was nothing religious in my post.I am glad that people like you are in the minority or we would still be using stone knives.People like you are a waste of the Earth's resources.For you tomorrow will be like today, and the day after tomorrow will be like the day before yesterday. Your remaining days will be a tedious collection of hours full of useless actions. People like you think no new thoughts, and you forget what little you have known. Older you become, but not wiser. Stiffer, but not

I agree with your general point about how the future will be more different than we imagine, but quantum entanglement doesn't help with FTL I'm afraid. Although you can measure an entangled particle and therefore cause its partner to become the anti-particle of what you end up detecting, you can't use it to transmit data because the tranmitted 'bit' will always be random between the particle and antiparticle. So yes you can transmit noise FTL through entanglement, but not information sadly. The fact that th

Back in the 1990s, I was on a commuter flight whose pilot decided to land in the middle of a thunderstorm. The turbulence was so bad that if you didn't have your seatbelt fastened, you would be thrown out of your seat. But the experience made me realize that the lightning we see from the ground is just a tiny fraction of all the lightning that goes off. The vast majority of it is air-to-air, not air-to-ground, and hidden from view from the ground by the thick clouds during a thunderstorm. Up at 25,000 f

Natural implies repetition. Repetition is needed for naturalness because without repetition you cannot analyze it and place it in the context of a larger systems, thus providing "explanation": "it's natural"

When I was a juvenile I heard a racist joke; it was something like Q: "What do you find in a Polack's nose?" A: "Fingerprints." Of course, at this young age I did not know different nations, but I did know fish. So I thought it was exceedingly odd that, first, the fish pollock has noses; second, that people wanted to look inside them; and third, that they would find that other people had already been digitally exploring in there! (Later I learned the national meaning, and the joke became a lot less stup

In some ways Polish_notation is opposite to the way we usually do arithmetic. That is why when I first formulated the thesis and then brought the argumentation, I brought the allusion to Polish notation, implying that NatasRevol did not recognize the structure of my comment (the other possibility of course is that this user simply

Yeah, I left out the thought (somewhat expressed in the XKCD link) which was the source of my post: I recalled it as Reverse Polish Notation, and seeing it without the Reverse caused me to take a trip down memory lane. And now that I read the link, I've learned something new: there is an inverse form of the RPN I learned long ago, which has the operators in front. I'm guessing the calculator (and Forth, etc) creators chose to reverse it, as that makes stack-based operations easier. Anyway, enjoy!

There is the 'principle of mediocrity' which simply suggests that we shouldn't assume that we are in a special location in the universe. It's clear however that even though nature is composed of simple building blocks (at least the few percent of the universe that consists of baryonic matter and energy that we can detect) it is capable of immense variety as the laws of the universe unfold. The solar system with its eight planets is actually a good example, many celestial bodies are very distict, for example

If the flock of chickens in my yard happen to stand such that they clearly spell out the word "unique", is that unnatural or just chance? What if they make a pattern that doesn't happen to be significant, but that we can't expect them ever to make again?

Not natural does not imply unnatural. In other words, "unnatural" needs another definition. I am offering you a consistent definition of "natural" as a set of things that could be a subject of a scientific method.

Unnatural in common usage means something that seems to be created by intelligent will, going in some way against the natural order of things. But we have to know that to claim that. For most of the things that are unique we simply do not know anything to imply either intelligent will or some unkno

I remember someone explaining why the sky was blue by saying it was because it transmitted every colors but blue. That's not explaining, it's just saying it's blue. Some people seem ok with reformulating real world things with scientific words and believing it's an explanation.

If somebody explains to you how colors work, it's up to you to have the basic faculty to understand the explanation. Saying that color x is the most reflected color of an object makes it color x is the most basic and accurate explanation of why a thing is one color and not another. To understand the subjectivity of color to the human mind would take a much more detailed explanation of the human retina and nervous system and the brain itself. To understand the greater depth of the physicality of light would

Saying that color x is the most reflected color of an object makes it color x is the most basic and accurate explanation of why a thing is one color and not another.

During my college orientation, among other activities, we were shown some kind of presentation where this woman claimed that pouring water into a red glass imbued it with some attributes associated with the color red. I knew it was bunk and raised my hand. When I was called on, I explained that the glass was red because it allowed all colors t

When I was called on, I explained that the glass was red because it allowed all colors to pass through it except for the color red. This color was reflected back to our eyes.

Nice theory, except that red light is transmitted through a red glass, not reflected off it, as you could verify by the simple experiment of holding that glass up to a light source. So, the opposite of what you just said is the case. No wonder your teacher was annoyed with the question.

It doesn't look like part of the cloud to me, the brightness and tint isn't quite right. It looks more like a reflection, as if there were glass between the camera and the sky, with something in the foreground reflecting at just the right place to make it look like part of the cloud.

HARP nothing, it's the Chupacabras that are doing it. With their minds. To communicate with bigfoot... who lives partway down the holes to hell and who are generating EM ghost signatures. With their minds. To confuse the witches that call in to Coast to Coast (formerly with Art Bell) into thinking they are possessed. All of which means NASA has been hiding evidence of life on mars from us. In order to misdirect our attention from the faked moon landings. [runs away, foaming at mouth]

My first thought was that it was some disturbance in the air between the photographer and the clouds causing diffraction that made the cloud appear to warp, but the ice crystal explanation seems to fit the picture better. It does remind me of pictures I've seen of ice halos - but I never heard they could "move" like that.

I watch thunderstorms very closely. 2 summers ago I saw a thunderstorm over my hometown of Baltimore and saw exactly this kind of behavior. It was like the entire side of the cloud tower suddenly bent and twisted around. It looked impossibly huge and fast moving at the time, like a huge piece of sheet metal snapping around suddenly. It definitely smacked of some kind of electrical related effect. Very cool to see this confirmed.

More importantly, why don't video sites recognise this and change the aspect ratio of the player to match? Also seems like there should be some way to tag mobile video formats with accelerometer readings (and therefore orientation) during recording.